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PAST
CLAUDE
COLLINS-STRACENSKY A quirky humor underlies a fundamental practicality in the artwork of Claude Collins-Stracensky. The sculpture generated from his studio practice often appears to be prototypes for mass-produced furniture appropriate for a variety of domestic settings. Offering an oblique comment on what to do with used chewing gum, "Proppo," (1999), a stand for a stereo system, is held up by what appears to be a giant foundation of molded bubble gum. The piece was the basis of a performance last year in which a costumed DJ played music on "Proppo" within a rec-room environment that included another piece of sculpture, a six-foot-tall artificial cactus -- an easy plant to care for, especially in southern California, and therefore probably least in demand among connoisseurs of artificial foliage. What's fake becomes both real and practical in Collins-Stracensky's work. Collins-Stracensky's sense of humor, as well as his panache for innovative performative gestures reoccurs throughout his work. In a project entitled "Popsicle Commercial", Collins-Stracensky teams an interactive installation and a costumed DJ with a participatory audience to create an environment that is variable and continuous, somewhere between sculpture and a rave. Collins-Stracensky's current project, which was presented at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, is a work in progress entitled "Living Room." While the formal details and attention to craft enable the sculptural elements to stand strongly on their own, they are recontextualized and enlivened by the performances that occur around them or by those that are alluded to take place. For example, "Rock Shelf with Reflexive Library" serves as a functional object, practically and aesthetically housing a collection of books, but further, implies (and as the title implies by the term "reflexive") an ongoing performative interaction with the reader who owns it.
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